Mark Patterson's blog

Today we learned that by the end of this week PLoS ONE (in keeping with all other PLoS journals) will be indexed by the Web of Science – this is an important literature discovery tool that many people use and so we are pleased to be indexed. PLoS ONE is also indexed by a host of other services such as PubMed, MEDLINE, PubMed Central, Scopus, Google Scholar, the Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS), EMBASE, AGRICOLA, PsycINFO, Zoological Records, FSTA (Food Science and Technology Abstracts), GeoRef, and RefAware.

Earlier this year, PLoS sent out a series of surveys to authors whose work was considered by our journals in 2008. We wanted to find out what authors think about all aspects of our services – from submission and peer review, through to publication and the functionality of the PLoS journal web sites.

From September 14-16, 2009, the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) held its inaugural conference in Lund, Sweden. The talks from the meeting are now available online.

As part of our ongoing article-level metrics program, we’re delighted to announce that all seven PLoS journals will now provide online usage data for published articles. With this addition, the suite of metrics on PLoS articles now includes measures of: online usage; citations from the scholarly literature; social bookmarks; blog coverage; and the Comments, Notes and ‘Star’ ratings that have been made on the article.

In 2009, in this online world, how do most scientists and medics find the articles they need to read? The answer for the content published by PLoS (and no doubt by many other publishers) is via one of the now ubiquitous search engines, be it one that only searches the scientific literature, or more likely, one that searches the entire web. Given that readers tend to navigate directly to the articles that are relevant to them, regardless of the journal they were published in, why then do researchers and their paymasters remain wedded to assessing individual articles by using a metric (the impact factor) that attempts to measure the average citations to a whole journal? We’d argue that it’s primarily because there has been no strong alternative. But now alternatives are beginning to emerge.